The problem here is mostly office workers. I do think Americans spend "too much" time in the office, but this is because so much time is wasted, due to the cost

The problem here is mostly office workers. I do think Americans spend "too much" time in the office, but this is because so much time is wasted, due to the costs of working in a big bureaucracy. While it's easy to say "I could work 50% less time and accomplish just as much", actually doing that in a sustainable way (e.g. without shifting mindless busywork onto other people) is a hard problem. It's a bit like all these people talking about government waste. Yes, we know there is government waste. But that doesn't mean we know how to make the government more efficient in a sustainable way. This is because the government is also a big bureaucracy, and making these structures efficient is something that we don't know how to do very well. People tend to carve out their own little empires, they sabotage each other, they create their own view of the world which differs from the view of the world of someone one level up or down, and then they spend effort on things not really explainable to those outside their view of the world, and often those efforts don't make much sense to people outside that specific bubble. What this means as that as we continue to get more bureaucratic, the situation will only get worse, not better. We will be able to accomplish less and less real work in the same unit of time. You can see this now with irreality everywhere. It's infuriating, but unclear on what to do about it. It's bubble-within-bubble with so much effort expended at completely irrelevant things to anyone outside the concern-bubble. That is why people end up working crazy long hours in the economy as a whole just to keep things going, and telling people to "work less" is a bit like treating the government waste problem by cutting all budgets by 10%. All that happens is that work piles up and the organization as a whole becomes less efficient over the long term.